The Inner Western Marxism of Soviet Philosophy

From left to right: G. S. Batishchev, E. V. Ilyenkov, and V. S.Bibleer at a roundtable.

I recently wrote a review of Gabriel Rockhill’s controversial new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?1 Afterward I received a great deal of correspondence and engaged in some fruitful discussions. These exchanges brought Evald Ilyenkov back to mind, a thinker whom I had studied only briefly before. Returning to him made me realize that the question raised by Rockhill’s critique of Western Marxism cannot be settled simply by exposing the institutional conditions under which certain theories circulated during the Cold War. It is for this reason that I have written this piece: as a follow-up to my review, but also as an attempt to think more carefully about the fate of Marxist philosophy across the division between East and West.

The enthusiasm and criticism that Rockhill’s argument has generated among sectors of the so-called “Western Left” have made me increasingly uneasy about the conventional map of Marxist thought. According to that map, Western Marxism and Soviet Marxism are usually positioned in moralized opposition. For some, Western Marxism appears as a betrayal of Soviet Marxism: a retreat from revolutionary politics into academic theory, cultural criticism, philosophical abstraction, and, in Rockhill’s terms, the institutions of the imperial theory industry. For others, the opposite is true: Soviet Marxism appears as the betrayal of Marxism itself, a reduction of revolutionary thought to dogma, state ideology, bureaucratic orthodoxy, and philosophical repression. This division is too simple. It reproduces, within Marxist intellectual history, a familiar Cold War geography: The West thinks, the East repeats; the West produces theory, the Soviet Union produces orthodoxy.

In a sense, Rockhill is right to remind us that Western Marxism did not develop in an innocent space. His central claim is that “ideas are not separate from reality, hovering above it in a pristine realm of conceptual purity,” but are produced within concrete circumstances and within the social organization of intellectual production.2 For this reason, he insists that the struggle over theory must be understood as part of class struggle. In his account, imperial war is inseparable from ideological warfare, and the intelligentsia, such as journalists, writers, artists, pundits, and professors, plays a crucial role in this struggle over hearts and minds.3

This is a necessary intervention. However, as I discussed in my previous review, Rockhill’s critique paradoxically reveals the ambivalence of Western Marxism. If, as he argues, ideological warfare is an essential component of imperialist war, and if the intelligentsia plays a decisive role in that warfare, then the reverse must also be considered. Could Western Marxism not, in fact, be understood as a strategic reorientation intended to counter the ideological maneuvers of imperialism itself? The problem is that Rockhill proceeds to criticize Western Marxism only after having already made a priori judgements about “the role of the intelligentsia.” As a result, his critique not only loses a measure of objectivity; it also exposes the ideological presupposition that underlies his own position. What emerges here is a form of anti-intellectualism, one that shadows his argument even as he claims to unmask the ideological function of intellectuals.

Of course, we must distance ourselves from the naive belief that theory circulates freely within a pure republic of letters. Ideas are never detached from their material conditions of production and circulation. Universities, foundations, publishing houses, journals, conferences, cultural diplomacy, intelligence agencies, and the professional intelligentsia all form part of the apparatus through which theory is produced, authorized, legitimized, and disseminated. To recognize this is not to reduce theory to conspiracy, nor to deny the autonomy of thought. Rather, it is to insist that intellectual production is always embedded in institutions, funding structures, geopolitical pressures, and class relations.

Viewed from a non-Western context, particularly that of Asia, Rockhill’s intervention raises several important questions, for it is undeniable that Western Marxism was introduced into many Asian intellectual contexts not only as a political theory, but also as a form of cultural enrichment, or Bildung. Even today, it is often consumed in this manner: as a sign of theoretical sophistication, cosmopolitan education, and intellectual distinction. Yet I remain unconvinced that the political meaning of a theory can be fully determined by its institutional origin. To expose the apparatus that funded, promoted, or circulated a body of thought is not yet to exhaust what that thought became in different contexts. Theory travels. It mutates. It is mistranslated, appropriated, weaponized, and sometimes used against the very forces that helped to circulate it. This is where my disagreement with Rockhill begins. As I pointed out, his account risks becoming too production centered if it assumes that the origin or sponsorship of a theory fixes its meaning once and for all. This is where Evald Ilyenkov becomes crucial. His presence disrupts the rigid distinction between Western Marxism and Soviet Marxism that some figures of the Western left, including Rockhill, still presuppose. Ilyenkov shows that Soviet Marxism was never simply reducible to official doctrine, just as Western Marxism was never a homogeneous ideological formation.

David Bakhurst’s Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy allows us to challenge the assumption that Soviet philosophy was reducible to official Marxism-Leninism. His book shows that beneath the frozen language of orthodoxy there existed a serious and original tradition of critical Marxism. This tradition was concerned with Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky, consciousness, language, labor, social practice, and the formation of the self. At the center of Bakhurst’s account stands Ilyenkov, perhaps one of the most important “critical Marxists” in the Soviet philosophical tradition. Against the familiar caricature of Soviet Marxism as “an ideology peddling a crude and dogmatic Marxism,” Bakhurst shows that critical Marxists in Moscow drew deeply on “the philosophy of Hegel and the German classical tradition.” For these thinkers, the recovery of a “genuine” Marxism within Soviet political culture was not a merely academic matter, but “an essential prerequisite of the rejuvenation of Soviet society.”4

Ilyenkov’s work asks many of the questions we normally associate with Western Marxism: What is consciousness? How is the subject formed? How does social labor become embodied in things? How do objectified forms return to shape human beings? How can Marxism resist both positivism and idealism? These are not marginal questions. They are the very questions through which Western Marxism defined itself after the defeat of revolution in the West.

But Ilyenkov asked them from another historical position. He was not writing from the defeated West, but from inside the Soviet Union, where revolution had succeeded and then hardened into bureaucracy. This difference matters. Western Marxism often begins from the failure of revolution; Ilyenkov’s Marxism begins from the deformation of revolution. His question is not simply why the revolution failed to happen, but how a revolution that did happen could turn into dogma, administration, and ideological control.

This is why I think we can speak of an inner Western Marxism in Soviet philosophy. I do not mean that Soviet thinkers were secretly imitating Western Marxists. Rather, I mean that the philosophical problematic of Western Marxism—i.e., Hegel, alienation, consciousness, praxis, totality, the critique of positivism—was also present inside Soviet Marxism. It existed as a suppressed or marginalized current, struggling against Stalinist orthodoxy and crude scientific materialism.

The early Soviet debates between the mechanists and the Deborinites are crucial here. The mechanists tried to align Marxism closely with the natural sciences. They tended to see philosophy as a generalization of scientific results. The Deborinites, by contrast, defended Hegelian dialectics and insisted that Marxism could not be reduced to empirical science. This debate was not just a local Soviet quarrel. It reiterated a fundamental tension within Marxism: Is Marxism a science modeled on the natural sciences, or a dialectical theory of social totality, practice, and historical transformation?

This tension also runs through Western Marxism. Lukács and Korsch, for example, resisted the positivist reduction of Marxism and returned to Hegel to recover the active, historical, and practical dimensions of Marxist theory. In that sense, the Soviet debates of the 1920s belong to the same wider history. They show that the division between positivist Marxism and Hegelian Marxism was not simply a Western problem. It was internal to Marxism as such. Bakhurst suggests that the mechanist-Deborinite controversy recalls the opposition, discussed by Sebastiano Timpanaro, between positivist and Hegelian tendencies within Western Marxism.5

As I have discussed elsewhere, Yehoshua Yakhot’s The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR provides the tragic historical background to this story. Yakhot shows how the relatively open and intellectually vibrant philosophical debates of the 1920s in the USSR were gradually closed down in the 1930s through Stalinization. Philosophy became a “front,” a site of ideological struggle, and eventually a weapon of discipline. The defeat of both the mechanists and the Deborinites was not simply the result of better arguments. It was produced through political intervention, denunciation, and the transformation of philosophy into an instrument of state power. The suspension of the debate between the two groups “signalled the beginning of the dictatorship on the ideological front,” which would become one of the defining features of the Stalin cult.6

This point is essential for my critique of Rockhill. One can criticize the Cold War manipulation of Western Marxism without romanticizing Soviet orthodoxy. The problem is not simply “West bad, Soviet good.” The more difficult problem is how Marxism, in both East and West, was captured by different apparatuses of power. In the West, Marxist theory could be absorbed into universities, foundations, cultural diplomacy, and anti-communist intellectual networks. In the Soviet Union, Marxism could be transformed into state doctrine, bureaucratic language, and a disciplinary ideology. These are different forms of capture, but both raise the same question: How can Marxist thought survive its own institutionalization?

The problem, then, is not that Soviet Marxism naturally became dogmatic. The problem is that a living philosophical field was suppressed. Stalinism did not simply continue Marxism; it reorganized Marxism into an ideology of authority. This is precisely why Ilyenkov believed that the tensions between the mechanists and the Deborinites should not be prematurely resolved. Instead, those tensions had to be worked through and systematized as the basis for a social theory of consciousness in its own right.7 In this sense, Stalinist ideology inverted material reality and obscured social relations in the very name of Marxism. For Yakhot, the history of Soviet philosophy is therefore also the history of a lost possibility.8

Ilyenkov belongs to this lost possibility. His work can be read as an attempt to recover Marxism after its Stalinist deformation. He returns to Hegel and Marx, but not to produce abstract speculation. He wants to understand how human beings become thinking, social, historical beings. His central concept, the ideal, is decisive for this project. For Ilyenkov, the ideal is not a private mental image. It is not simply something inside the head. Nor is it a spiritual substance existing beyond the material world. The ideal exists in socially produced material forms.

It is present in tools, language, money, artworks, institutions, customs, laws, and forms of education. A human object is never merely a physical thing. It is a crystallization of social activity. A table is not only wood; money is not only paper or metal; a word is not only sound. These things carry social meanings because they embody collective human practice. Ilyenkov’s point is not to spiritualize matter, but to show how social activity becomes embodied in objective forms.9 Ilyenkov remains more directly attached to a materialist theory of social practice. He does not oppose the ideal to the material. He shows that the ideal is material when materiality is understood socially, historically, and practically.

This is where Ilyenkov’s thought comes into striking proximity with Western Marxism. Like Lukács, he is concerned with the objectification of human activity in social forms. Like Gramsci, he understands consciousness as something historically and collectively formed through education, culture, and social practice. And, like the Frankfurt School, he resists the reduction of reason to technical calculation, insisting instead on its embeddedness in forms of life, labor, and social mediation.

This also allows us to criticize a certain genealogical reductionism. Rockhill’s critique is strongest when it reveals the institutions, networks, and political interests that shaped the Cold War circulation of theory. He describes Western Marxism as better understood as “imperial Marxism,” produced through the dialectical relation between the objective forces of the imperial superstructure and the subjective agency of intellectuals.10 Yet Ilyenkov’s history suggests that the so-called Western Marxist problematic was not merely a product of Western institutions. It was also alive inside Soviet philosophy as an internal struggle against Stalinist dogmatism and positivist reductionism.

This is why Ilyenkov’s critique of reductionism matters. Ilyenkov opposed theories that reduced consciousness to the brain, biology, cybernetics, or innate ability. He thought such theories were not only philosophically wrong but politically dangerous. If consciousness is simply a biological function, then education becomes a matter of identifying pre-given capacities. Some children are supposedly born for mathematics, others for music, others for manual labor. Such a view naturalizes social division. It justifies hierarchy by presenting it as nature. Bakhurst discusses this as part of Ilyenkov’s broader polemic against reductionist accounts of mind and individuality.11

Against this, Ilyenkov insists that the individual is socially constituted. Human beings become thinking subjects through language, labor, education, and participation in shared forms of life. This is a deeply Marxist claim. It is also a deeply anti-Stalinist claim because it refuses to treat people as fixed units to be administered by the state. The human being is not a machine, not a brain mechanism, not an object of bureaucratic classification. The human being is a historical and social possibility.

Ilyenkov’s philosophy is not only a theory of consciousness but also a theory of communist human formation. He wants to know what kind of society could produce fully developed individuals. This question goes back to Marx’s critique of the division of labor, but in Ilyenkov it acquires a specific Soviet urgency. A socialist society that reproduces specialization, bureaucracy, and passive obedience has not overcome alienation. It has merely changed its form.

In this sense, Ilyenkov’s Marxism is both orthodox and radical. It is orthodox because it returns to Marx, Hegel, Lenin, and the classical problems of dialectical materialism. But it is radical because it uses this inheritance against Soviet orthodoxy itself. It shows that a genuinely Marxist philosophy cannot simply serve the state. It must criticize the forms of alienation that persist even under socialism.

Rockhill is also right that much Western Marxism became theory centered, detached from organized progressive politics, and absorbed into the symbolic economy of the academic world. He describes this as a commodified version of anti-communist Marxism, a product of the imperial theory industry that often misdirects those searching for a guide to understanding and transforming the world.12 Ilyenkov’s work, however, disrupts the neat distinction presupposed by this critique. If the supposedly Western Marxist problematic, consisting of Hegel, alienation, praxis, consciousness, and the critique of positivism, also emerged inside Soviet philosophy, then these problems cannot be reduced to the imperial theory industry alone.

The phrase “inner Western Marxism” is therefore not merely descriptive. It is polemical. It asks us to revise the intellectual history of Marxism. We should no longer say that Western Marxism was philosophical while Soviet Marxism was dogmatic. Rather, we should distinguish between official Soviet ideology and critical Soviet Marxism. Ilyenkov belongs to the latter. So do the suppressed debates reconstructed by Yakhot. These traditions show that the Soviet experience contained its own philosophical struggle over alienation, consciousness, praxis, and freedom.

The difference between Western Marxism and this Soviet inner current is therefore not theoretical alone; it is historical. Western Marxism emerged from defeat in the West. Soviet critical Marxism emerged from betrayal in the East. Western Marxism asked why the proletariat had not become revolutionary. Soviet critical Marxism asked why a revolution carried out in the name of the proletariat had produced new forms of domination. These are different questions, but they belong to the same Marxist problematic.

For this reason, Ilyenkov should not be treated as a provincial Soviet thinker. He should be read alongside Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Lefebvre, and the Frankfurt School. But he should also be read against them. His work reminds us that the problem of Marxism was never only about capitalism. It was also the problem of Marxism’s own institutionalization, its conversion into doctrine, its capture by the state, and its transformation into an ideology of mastery.

To speak of inner Western Marxism in Soviet philosophy is therefore to name a paradox: The questions of Western Marxism were never simply Western. They appeared wherever Marxism confronted the failure of its own promise. In the West, this failure appeared as defeat, commodification, and cultural integration. In the Soviet Union, it took the form of Stalinization, bureaucracy, and the suppression of philosophical life.

Ilyenkov’s importance lies in his refusal to accept this closure. He reopened the question of Marxism from within the Soviet system itself. In his examination of the mechanists and the Deborinites, Ilyenkov regarded this conflict as rooted in a tension already present in Marx’s own thought. He therefore interpreted the schism not simply as a dispute between rival schools, but as the manifestation of an internal contradiction within the Marxist tradition.

This is why I see Ilyenkov as a figure of inner Western Marxism: not Western by geography, but Western in the sense of belonging to that philosophical Marxism which refuses positivism, resists dogma, and insists on the unresolved question of human emancipation. Yet perhaps even this formulation remains too Western. What Ilyenkov ultimately teaches us is that Marxism’s most powerful philosophical questions were never the property of one region. They were internal to the global fate of revolution itself.